Being Honest on Iran

Paul Pillar challenges advocates of increased sanctions to acknowledge their real position on Iran. He observes that their contention that their bill would help to extract more concessions from Iran is already being proven wrong:

And if that weren’t enough, counterparts to Kirk and Menendez in the Iranian legislature are providing further evidence of the destructive effect of what is transpiring on Capitol Hill, with the Iranian legislators’ bill calling for Iran to start enriching uranium to a level well beyond what it has ever done before if the United States imposes any new sanctions. This is direct confirmation of how threats and hardline obstinacy, especially at this juncture, beget threats and hardline obstinacy from the other side. The Iranian bill also provides a real-life opportunity for some role reversal. Does this threat emanating from the majlis make U.S. policy-makers more inclined to take a softer line and make more concessions? Of course not.

Iranian legislators take the Kirk-Menendez bill as evidence that the U.S. is negotiating in bad faith, and now American hawks can point to the reaction of Iranian legislators as “confirmation” that the Iranian government isn’t serious about negotiating a final agreement. It should be clear that hard-liners on both sides want to set up obstacles to make it impossible to reach a final agreement, and they are relying on one another’s posturing to justify what they are doing. This is a very instructive example of how the sabotage of one side’s hard-liners prompts hard-liners on the other side to commit their own attempted sabotage of negotiations. If their goal was to help diplomacy succeed, they would not be doing the things they are doing, but then that has been obvious for years. Considering the maximalist conditions that many hawks have set for what a “good deal” would include, they can’t possibly want the sort of compromise arrangement that any comprehensive agreement entails, and so of course they want the negotiations to collapse.

Hawks are typically uninterested in thinking very much about how their preferred policy looks to other governments, and they are usually offended when someone suggests that they look at an issue from the perspective of another government. Even though these hawks automatically interpret the emptiest rhetorical bluster as proof of implacable, unyielding hostility, they assume that hawks in other countries respond to constant threats and coercion a very different way. If the U.S. imposes sanctions and threatens to attack another country, the other government will normally respond defiantly and angrily just as we would if we were in their position. One would think that hawks would be the first to understand that the foreign government’s predictable response would be to dig in its heels and refuse to make concessions under duress, since that is a normal reaction to repeated expressions of hostility, but instead they assume that all other governments can be compelled to yield and engage in what hawks would inevitably call appeasement if our government did it. Despite the fact that they are regularly issuing threats, hawks have a remarkably poor grasp of how other states react to them.

“Despite the fact that they are regularly issuing threats, hawks have a remarkably poor grasp of how other states react to them.”

Call it the Wilson-Polk Effect: extreme moralism and righteousness, coupled with propensity to project force instead of, rather than as an extension of, politics. The amazing thing – and it should not be amazing, but it remains so – is that we have been here before, and we know what the outcome is going to be. So the proponents of the “hard line” in Congress are either lunatics or dishonest – and likely both. We know, for example, what four little words in a speech did, not only to US-Iran cooperation in Afghanistan, but also to Iran’s quasi-reformist President and the reform movement in general. How is it that they think Iranians would simply cower in fear and get on their knees faced with additional sanctions even as they think they are making concessions?

Rather the hawks understand that at least a pretense of first seeking a diplomatic solution must be maintained. And so, ultimatum after ultimatum is issued, with the hawks repeatedly refusing to take “yes” for an answer, until the point is reached where the sovereignty of the other government can’t be compromised any further. Then that country, finally, says, “no,” the US hawks bark and howl about how diplomacy has been tried but has failed, and now there is nothing left to do, unless the US wants to be seen as a paper tiger, making threats but not following through on them, and thereby losing its “credibility,” but make war on that government.

But, of course, all along, war was the preferred if not the only possible outcome. They’re hawks. They WANT war. They despise real, constructive, compromising diplomacy. The charade of pseudo diplomacy they engage in is for domestic political consumption, to help “sell” the war to a skeptical public.

Chomsky pointed this out ages ago, at least as far back as the bullying of Serbia over Kosovo…

There you go again, applying reason to punditry and political posturing. It’s like explaining to the actor playing Hamlet the consequences of killing Polonius and expecting him therefore to be more careful. The play must go on, doncha know.

Fake Herzog is probably right about treating them as enemies and to diminish their influence in the Middle East. However, the way to do that is not to push them into a fight and make them a victim or call their bluff and end up with lots more enriched uranium floating around. We need to stop pushing as long as they are not enriching like they say they are not. There is sufficient intelligence that they are being honest about that.

While this article shows the shortcomings of the hawkish strategy in gaining concessions from Iran, it makes the mistake, as many other comments have noted, of assuming that these hawks actually desire a peaceful solution. They know this is a prelude to war, and that is exactly what they want.